Catherine Narracott
The Wife
‘Madame Narracott, thank you for joining us.’
I’ve been led into a small, dark, horrid-smelling room off the library. I take the armchair indicated opposite the French detective. ‘What … is this place?’
‘It’s the fumoir, Madame. We thought it would be private, nice and quiet.’
‘Oh.’ I look about. It’s rather like sitting inside a cigar box: wood panelling, seats upholstered in claret-coloured leather and a pall of old smoke that catches at the back of my throat and makes my eyes water.
A humidor cabinet bristles with cigars of all shapes and sizes.
It reminds me of the dining room at home after all the women had departed and Daddy talked to his cronies for hours.
All around us are very masculine scenes of snowy hunts and heroic-looking mountaineers.
The one on the wall opposite, with his swept-back hair and strong chin, looks rather like Anthony.
I smooth the wool over my knees. I hope the smell of stale smoke doesn’t permeate the fabric.
I have brushed my hair, put on some lipstick and a dove-grey silk shirt and black wool skirt for the interview.
It felt important after the horror and upset of the last few hours; it is crucial never to underestimate the power of clothes to restore one’s sense of order and control.
After that torrid afternoon when I answered the phone to her voice in Anthony’s apartment I went straight to Fenwick’s and bought a fabulously expensive new dress by Norman Hartnell, even though (or perhaps because?) I knew we could not afford it.
‘Madame?’ Suddenly I realise the detective has asked me a question.
‘Oh. I— I was just struck by how much the man in the portrait looks like my husband. But maybe I’m seeing him everywhere …’
‘I am so sorry for your loss, my dear child,’ says a high, quavering voice.
I see that, for some reason, there are also two women in the room – two of the three we saw on the first day.
The elderly one has a large pile of fleecy wool in her lap and reminds me a little of the maiden aunts at the Season balls who would sit off to the side and cast judgement on the new crop of debs.
The other one, the younger woman with the dark-gold hair, sits further back from the other two at a little table with a typewriter.
She gives me a cool look, then starts typing.
‘Miss Marple is helping me with my investigations,’ says Inspector Moreau.
I manage to smile at her. ‘Thank you,’ I say.
He indicates the younger woman. ‘And Madame Glass is making a record of our conversation.’
‘I hope you are feeling better,’ Miss Marple says.
She turns to Inspector Moreau. ‘Mrs Narracott fainted earlier. I had a maid once who was prone to fainting,’ she says, absent-mindedly.
‘It always seemed to happen if someone surprised her when she was scrubbing the baseboards.’ And then, as if remembering herself, ‘Anyway. I am glad you have recovered.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I am feeling a little better.’
She might be a little mad, I think. But as the French inspector begins to ask me about what prompted our holiday, the journey here, etcetera, I find her a reassuring presence – even the sound of her knitting needles clicking together has something soothing in it.
She makes this interaction feel softer, less confronting, more like a friendly chat.
One feels that nothing too bad can happen in a room that has her in it.
Miss Glass I’m not so sure about. There’s something rather austere about her and the ghastly bump on her forehead doesn’t soften her appearance.
‘Could we start,’ the policeman says, ‘with Bruno Crane?’
I shudder, thinking of him crashing into my room earlier.
‘I think it was a surprise,’ the detective continues, ‘to find him here?’
I glance across at the old woman. The needles are still clicking away but I’m sure there is a new alertness to her posture. She was there in Reception when I was introduced to Bruno Crane.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It seemed odd. I couldn’t work out why my husband would be friends with a man like that.’
‘In what sense?’
‘Ah,’ I try to find a delicate way of putting it. ‘He’s very … coarse. Perhaps not quite – not quite our sort of person.’
‘Your class, do you mean?’
‘Well … yes, I suppose I do. And he also seemed not to like my husband very much. I’d say he seemed jealous, or perhaps resentful of him in some way.
’ I think again of him crashing into the room.
‘What do you think he was looking for this morning, when he attacked me?’ I ask the French detective. ‘He seemed – crazed.’
‘Ah,’ he smiles at me. ‘But I was going to ask you the same thing. Do you have any idea?’
‘Only that he seemed to think Anthony might have hidden something in our room.’
‘And did he? Hide something?’
He is watching me very carefully. ‘No,’ I say. ‘At least … I don’t think so. But you are welcome to search it, if that is helpful. Because if he did—’ I hesitate.
‘Yes, Madame?’
‘Well, I might not have been aware of it. I take some rather strong medicine to help me sleep; it makes me dead to the world. But what could my husband possibly have wanted to hide?’ I wait, but no answer comes, so I continue.
‘No … I think Bruno Crane is a little mad. And there’s something else.
When we first arrived here, we had to change rooms because someone put rat poison in the first one, and my husband thought it was probably Crane who did it. ’
‘I remember that,’ Miss Marple says, suddenly, ‘when I first saw you and your husband, in Reception. You were changing rooms.’
‘Rat poison?’ the detective asks.
‘Yes. And my husband thought it was just the sort of joke Crane might have played. But to me it seemed positively sinister … a threat. And I’m sure Anthony was shaken by it, really. Does it seem like a joke to you?’
Miss Marple speaks before the inspector does. ‘No, it doesn’t seem like a joke to me. I think it likely that whoever put the thing there was trying to send a clear message.’
‘And the first night, in the restaurant, someone had sent Anthony a pudding with nuts in and of course he was allergic. That, too, felt sinister – targeted. It caused a terrible scene.’
‘And last night,’ the inspector says. ‘There was a different scene in the restaurant.’
‘Yes,’ I close my eyes. ‘That’s right. I’m so ashamed to think of it now.
I suppose you saw it.’ I say this to Miss Marple; she gives a tiny nod.
‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t made such a fuss. To think that that was our last night together.
And I know there are times, as a wife, one should look in the other direction.
But when I found that earring … I’m sure she left it there on purpose.
That was the thing that really upset me.
The purposefulness. As though she was staking her claim.
It was so unlike me. But then at dinner I had drunk too much wine and something in me just … snapped!’
I remember the faces turning to look at me, the shame of it.
‘Of course,’ I say, ‘I see it clearly now. It was her. She came here to try and seduce him from me. She didn’t realise that all she was to him was a …
a whore.’ The word is a shock in the quiet of the room.
But I don’t mind … I suppose I want them to be shocked.
‘The satisfaction of a fleeting, base urge. He would never—’ I shut my eyes.
‘Oh, the whole thing was just disgusting. But I did understand it, from his perspective. Anthony worked very hard … the pressure of such a job, you know. I am not completely naive.’ I look at Miss Marple, because I think she will understand this better than the detective.
‘I do realise such things happen and are even normal at, well, our level of society. In a way it is rather accepted as their due. My mother explained it to me.’ There are some ideas about marriage that are very bourgeois.
Fidelity being one of them. Better to take up your own hobbies. Gardening is excellent.
‘Still,’ I say, ‘I expected more discretion. The earring seemed beyond the pale. But how I wish I had gone up the mountain with him now, even if I couldn’t have stopped his death, even if it was just to spend those last few moments together.
But I chose to spend the whole morning in the spa, instead, because I was still a little angry.
I saw your friend there, I think,’ I say to Miss Marple, who nods.
‘Oh yes, Dolly went before breakfast.’
‘But worst of all, she was there too. She even came into the hammam when I was there. Sat across from me as though she hadn’t any shame at all.
And I … well, this sounds childish. But I wasn’t going to be the one to leave first. It would have felt like conceding something.
After everything she had taken from me, I wasn’t going to give her that.
’ I look at my hands in my lap. ‘I know that must all sound very foolish.’
‘No,’ Miss Marple says, ‘I quite understand. There was a similar situation with the church flowers in my village. I grew some baby’s breath specially for the christening of our vicar’s baby, but Miss Hartnell told me it wouldn’t do because she had some damask roses that would be more striking.
Nevertheless, I took the baby’s breath over to the vicarage on the day and Griselda loved them and actually didn’t want the roses because she found the smell too powerful.
’ She blinks at me, earnestly. ‘St Mary’s is rather a small church. ’
‘Ye-es,’ says Inspector Moreau, dubiously. ‘Please continue, Madame Narracott. When did you see the actress in the spa?’
‘She got there a little after I did, I think. About nine o’clock – I remember feeling surprised that she was up so early.
She seems such a … creature of the night.
’ I mean the implication: whore. ‘So I suppose she must have poisoned him before she got there.’ At his expression of surprise: ‘Oh yes, I’m quite sure she did it.
Once he’d dashed all her hopes that she could steal him away from me.
I’m sure she isn’t used to having people say no to her. And she seems quite unstable.’
Miss Marple looks thoughtful. Then she says, ‘But my dear, she can’t have done. If indeed she was in the spa from nine o’clock.’
The inspector explains: ‘The spa is twenty minutes’ walk from the hotel and she went on foot. Your husband hadn’t even come down to Reception until about nine o’clock. He had his flask washed by the kitchen before they put the coffee in it.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I— Are you absolutely sure?’
He nods. ‘Yes. Unless you are incorrect in your timings—’
‘Well,’ I think quickly, ‘perhaps I have got them wrong! One can’t be totally certain about these things! Perhaps she got to the spa a little later than I had thought …’
‘But,’ the inspector says, almost apologetically, ‘she was also seen by several people on her way to the spa at quarter to nine. Her dog’ ? he pulls a face ? ‘even made a mess on the Reception carpet, on her way out.’
I sigh, and sit back in my seat.
He presses on. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to mention, Mrs Narracott? Any other interactions your husband had here that strike you as significant?’
‘Well, only if it is helpful. There was one person who was worrying my husband a little, though again he tried not to show it … the young man who gave me the medicine yesterday, in fact. He worried me too, actually. I’m sure I first spotted him in Paris, in the station concourse.
And I’m also sure he was originally waiting for a different train; he was on the platform across from ours.
I think he followed us here. And he kept following us once here, trying to talk to my husband, who did not want to talk to him.
He had a very … aggressive way about him.
‘Anthony tried so hard to lose him on a run that he nearly skied all of us over a cliff. I know he says he’s a doctor but I think he might also be a Red or something.
They seem to really have it in for my husband, because he promotes people working hard for their money.
He looks the type, don’t you think? And – I don’t want to sound like a snob – he doesn’t at all look the type to be staying in a place like this.
I certainly think you should have a word with him. ’